A Huge, Boat-Hurdling Carp Is No Mississippi Fish Story

By PETER T. KILBORN

Published: August 26, 2002

VICKSBURG, Miss., Aug. 23—
Five miles west of downtown Tunica, over the grassy levee that keeps the floods out of town, the fishermen who had gathered by the banks of the Mississippi were telling tales of crazed fish as big as hound dogs that leap out of the water and hit boaters on the head.

''This year there's a gang of them coming into the boats,'' said John Robertson, who helps out at a bait shop at Charlie's Landing, a fishing camp. ''If you're down there fishing, they'll jump over in the boat to you. I had one guy, it hit him and busted his mouth.''

In the next fishing camp over, Jack Bryan, who had joined some friends for breakfast beers at Big Roy's, a tavern, said: ''It started about two, three years ago. What I was told was, some of these fish ponds got flooded, and they spread all over.'' Two weeks ago, he said, a flying 48-pounder split a buddy's lip.

The men were sober. The tales were true. The fish were carp.

Grass carp, bighead carp and the neurotic silver carp -- giant, prolific species all originally imported by catfish farmers in Mississippi and Arkansas two decades ago to control detritus and unwanted plant and animal life in their manmade ponds -- have escaped in floods into the Mississippi, and have begun showing up as far north as Iowa and Illinois.

''They are thick as fleas in Mississippi tributaries,'' said Bill Reeves, chief of fisheries for the State of Tennessee.

These carp lack any touches of style, like a swordfish's elegant fins or a sturgeon's scoopy nose. The grass carp ''is like an aquatic cow,'' said Jack Killgore, a fisheries biologist at the Army Corps of Engineers' Waterways Experiment Station, a research center in Vicksburg. ''It just grazes.''

Now a more recent arrival, the black carp, is stirring alarm from New Orleans to Ontario. Also known as the snail carp and the Chinese roach, the black carp is a bottom-sucking ogre that can grow five feet long and up to 150 pounds. It gorges on mollusks -- including parasite-infested ram's horn snails, which can populate ponds and infect the catfish with wormy yellow grubs. Teeth in the back of its throat grind up its prey like garbage disposals.

The various carp species, imported from China, Russia and Vietnam, are banned from fish farms in several states. They are edible but largely uneaten here, except by some Asian immigrants for whom they are a dietary staple.

Most farms get along without them, said Hugh Warren, executive director of the Catfish Farmers of America, a trade association in Indianola, Miss., but a sizable minority believe they must have them. Several farmers in Arkansas breed small numbers of sterile black carp for sale to catfish farms in Arkansas and Mississippi.

As yet, none is known to have escaped a pond for the wild, but after two years of pressure from many states' conservation and natural resource agencies, the Fish and Wildlife Service on July 30 proposed adopting a rule designating the black carp an injurious species. On Aug. 3 it issued a similar ruling for the northern snakehead, a predatory Asian fish that has been found in Maryland, California, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

''The probability is high'' that the rule will be approved for the black carp after a 60-day comment period, said Ken Burton, a spokesman for the service. Opponents, he said, ''would have to present very convincing arguments, because all the evidence goes the other way.''

The rule would ban the importing and interstate shipping of the carp, although states that now allow them, like Mississippi and Arkansas, could continue to do so. The agency cited other ways to control snails on catfish farms, using chemicals and less invasive snail-eating fish. But some farmers say nothing works like black carp, and they intend to fight the ruling.

In the political storm that is brewing, the Mississippi Interstate Cooperative Resource Association, made up of natural resource agencies from 28 states and four federal agencies, favors such regulations. State and federal agriculture departments tend to oppose them.

''I've talked to both of our senators personally,'' said Mike Freeze, a black carp and bass farmer in Arkansas. ''I know both are opposed.'' The industry has formed a formidable lobby.

The earlier invasion of Asian carp into American waterways, before injurious-species regulations had been written and long after a ban would have any effect, presents a major conflict. It not only sets commercial interests against conservationists and ecologists, but also pits the interests of one business, catfish farming, against the interests of another, the sale of mussel shells to Japan to make cultured pearls.

In Mississippi, catfish have become the state's fourth-biggest crop. Like the casinos that have opened along the Mississippi River, catfish farms have helped sustain a region of the country, the Mississippi Delta, that ranks with Appalachia and Indian reservations in unemployment, poverty and disease. Workers who have lost jobs on mechanized cotton plantations find jobs at catfish processing plants.